What solutions does Oracle offer to Indian entities?
We at Oracle India, offer every single solution that the company offers all over the world as well. It is a complete suite of enterprise solutions that ranges from Database to Middleware to Applications.
It is the most comprehensive suite of solutions offered by any company in the world. Most of our competitors operate in one of these three spaces, or may be two, but nobody operates in all these three.
Recent research conducted by ITC indicates that SMEs will contribute almost 50% to the ERP applications marketing 2007 in India. So how do you propose to capitalize on this opportunity?
Well, we are capitalizing on it by focusing and updating a separate business. And by making available alternate provisions of products that are most suitable to small enterprises, are less complicated, easy to implement, less expensive, and are in line with the less complex needs that medium size business has.
We are nourishing this business such that initially, we were located in six major metropolitan cities. Now, we have points in presence in seventeen other cities across the country for we believe that there are too many of the medium size businesses that are already willing as well as able to grow technologically and would like quality in all their operations.
How is Oracle’s fourth largest market in Asia shaping up?
It is doing very well. We are being benefited from the strong level of economic activity and growth that the economy is exhibiting and has been expecting last several years. And, we hope this is expected to continue in future too. In addition, we are being benefited from within that overall growth. We believe a larger focus on IT and its recognition of how IT can help Indian companies improve productivity and competitiveness has enabled to compete in much more, both to domestic and global market as well.
In future, which key areas Oracle would like to map and address in terms of offering solutions?
Well, its multi-dimensional question although through, and it is both by product, by industry and also by market segment. In general, India is seeing good economy growth across all sectors. Our traditional areas of strength and strong performance have been the banking sector, telecom sector, government sector and manufacturing sector as well. So, indeed we are continuing at full speed ahead.
We believe the government sector is sort of less penetrated or less used to deploy IT solutions to meet needs when compared with more developed countries where the government is amongst the biggest user of IT. So, we feel that there is lot of potential in government space. We are doing a lot, but we think there is much more to do.
And in terms of solutions, as you know, our main product which additionally has been a database product on the top of which we have been doing very well on ERP solutions side, whereas, on the applications front, in addition to normal ERP we are finding a lot of interaction for which tradition is to focus on people management. So, increasing the focus is now on Customer Relations Management and Human Resources Management or Human Capital Management. Thus, we are seeing a good uptake of activity there, and also witnessing companies collecting and storing data to use it more constructively though in the area of business intelligence. We are seeing much more activities in Enterprise Performance Management, basically, again using this information more proactively to manage information.
Sectorally, any big company is continued to be one of the important domain for us. But, we are also very optimistic about the growth that medium size segment represents. And, we think the level of uptake, and the level of growth in this segment is going to be strong and we are focusing on that segment as well.
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